Bellator featherweight champion Pat Curran was winding down his training camp for a title defense against Patricio Freire in August, and he caught a punch that put him on the sidelines for weeks with a fractured orbital.

“I guess I was sparring with a guy a little bit too big,” Curran told the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Beatdown” show. “He was a boxer. I was just boxing down in Chicago. I don’t know, it was just a freak accident. I was sparring with him pretty much the whole camp leading up to the fight. It was my second to last sparring session and he just clipped me with a right hook, and it fractured it.”

If a fractured orbital sounds painful, that’s because it is.

“It was pretty painful,” Curran said. “It was my first time ever fracturing my orbital. When it happened, I really didn’t know what was going on. I was instantly blind. My nose started bleeding on the same side and I pretty much lost vision for about 30 minutes. It was hard for me to see out of that eye for a while, but in time, it healed.”

The injury didn’t require surgery. Instead, Curran went eight weeks without sparring and then switched to thicker headgear before jumping back in the ring to prepare for his defense against Freire, which takes place Thursday at Bellator Fighting Championships 85